Yet Another Lafferty Blog

This is a place to post my thoughts on the works of R. A. Lafferty. Please join in the conversation--reply with your ideas or express your opinions of mine. And go view the truly great Lafferty blogs: The Ants of God are Queer Fish (http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.com/ ), Continued on Next Rock (http://ralafferty.tumblr.com/ ), and the Lafferty Devotional Page (http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/RAL/).

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Some decades ago, I believe it was the summer I was 18--so 1984-ish, I would head on Fridays after work at my summer construction job to a local independent Santa Fe bookstore. Someone would always bring a six-pack of Tecate, and the owner would have limes to cut for the beer bottles. A group of us would sit around drinking beer and talking about Science Fiction. There was a young lady among the Friday afternoon regulars who was married to an exiled Czechoslovakian poet and political activist. Her husband lived in hiding in Los Alamos, NM unable to leave the confines of their compound out of fear of extradition. She would often read us her translations of her husband's poetry. One day, we were talking about Science Fiction's ability to explore the inner workings of government while being too outré to attract censorship. She thrust a copy of Fourth Mansions into my hands and told me it would help me understand what is really going on.

I read Fourth Mansions that summer, and it rapidly became my favorite book, by any author in any genre. A number of things in the book resonated with me immediately. I loved the idea of the brain weave because I had a close group of friends I had gone to high school with. We played Dungeons and Dragons together pretty much every weekend from the ages of 14, camped together, ran track together, and sat and blew off and read science fiction together. We had a close group dynamic that felt almost telepathic. It was a very little stretch to imagine that the group the Harvesters could literally move the world with a more intense science-fictional version of that same group dynamic.

In high school, we had a very strong art history curriculum, and over Christmas break a year and a half earlier, my group of friends and I had traveled to California and seen the Holbein exhibit at the Getty museum in Malibu (this was long before the new Getty Museum had been built in downtown LA). When Lafferty introduced each of the Harvesters by comparing them to paintings, I could see the paintings in my mind’s eye and have a sense of the personality he was describing.

I really loved the idea that many events in the story could have been happening only on a metaphorical level, from the confusion that Miguel Fuentes might have been a part of Michael Fountain’s under-mind rather than a distinct person, to Biddy lounging on subterranean beaches with wild dogs tearing her apart, to the final battle of Jim Bauer and Arouet Manion as giant snakes or bulls on a crumbling cliff edge.

And especially I resonated with the idea that there is more going on in the world than met the eye. I was going into my sophomore year of college, and I had a sense of evolving possibly into something great, and that there innumerable stumbling blocks in my way that could prevent me from reaching that greatness. More than anything, I responded to the sense of hope in the book that each of us can achieve evolution.

I do not believe that the Badgers, the Pythons, the Toads, and the Unfledged Falcons in any way reflects real conspiracies against the Human world. I believe they stand as a metaphor for the millions or billions of individual plots hatched by every person who wants a piece of the world pie. Plots that are no more than daydreams and minor greed, but that show the conflicted nature of each individual human. At least that's my interpretation.

Since that summer, I have read Fourth Mansions at least 7 times, and I get more out of it every time. To this day it remains my favorite book by any author in any genre. However, I still don't know how the wife of the Czechoslovakian poet interpreted it (and I still haven’t returned her book).

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

I was chatting about a sequence for republishing Lafferty novels. The obvious first choice is Past Master, because it is a rollicking, action-packed, and often deeply funny novel that is perhaps his most approachable book. But after Past Master, what next?

One obvious selection would be Okla Hannali. After the DAPL protests, a lot of focus has been placed on Native American issues. Okla Hannali is one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century. I firmly believe the U of O Press are among the genuinely good guys of the world, and I love the edition they publish. What I'd like to see is full-court press to get their edition advertised better, placed on the bookshelves of major chain bookstores under American Lit or Native American stories, and first and foremost urged into American Studies curriculums across the country. I really think this country could become a better place if more people read that book.

That being said, I have a different recommendation for the next Lafferty novel. Fourth Mansions feels more relevant today than it did when it was written. There is a feeling in today's world that things are not what they seem. That we are on the verge of greatness or breakthrough and being prevented by forces beyond both our control and our understanding. Ultimately, Fourth Mansions is a very hopeful book--full of the promise that we common everymen, we everylouts can master the monsters that beset us and bring about the next step in our collective development. It is a variation of the hope that The Once and Future King and the Harry Potter books offered--the hope the each of us could secretly be the chosen one, the one capable of leading humanity to success. However in Fourth Mansions though the gifts fall to Freddy Foley, he stands in for every one of us. The power is available to all people, not restricted to a single chosen one.

It'd have been great if Fourth Mansions could have been re-released when the fever over the Dan Brown book was at its peak, because the world could have seen how the conspiracy story could have been told in far greater depth with far greater economy, skill, and joy. Still, in today's political and media climate with bogus conspiracy theories du jour cropping up left, right, and far right, Fourth Mansions might feel spot on.

Monday, June 13, 2016

I'm currently rereading both Fourth Mansions and Arrive at Easterwine. While they are arguably tighter novels than The Devil is Dead and Archipelago, it strikes me that they have in common a narrative that is interrupted at times by reflection and reverie.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the longish excerpt from Archipelago that Daniel posted on his blog. In this example, the narrative starts in Hans' drunken reverie and switches to the real world seamlessly, without losing any of the feeling of idle daydream. He starts thinking about Marie's eyes and imagining the stories she would tell in her half of the conversation, and then she arrives and the conversation continues with Marie actually participating. However, at no point does the the conversation lose that kind of loose, tangential feeling of a drunken reverie.

The experience of reading The Devil is Dead has always struck me as awakening from just such a reverie. The individual scenes are striking, but it is very hard to remember how the book fits together. It has a very dream-like narrative, especially when you consider the prescience Finnegan has about the two lives and two faces of Papadiabolous. And of course, the book is peppered with drunken stories told by the characters.

The narrative in Arrive at Easterwine exists on many levels of metaphor, and several times dispenses completely with straightforward narration of the supposed real world. I think the most pronounced example is the recurrent meditation on the Balbo family crest and its thrice-painted center emblem, El Brusco (the sudden or brusk one), La Brusca (the burning bush or passion or love), and Labrusca (the spring wine or Easter wine). Again, this narrative is in the form of a thought running into a tangential thought running into a deep analysis of an imagined detail. It is a recurrent daydream through the narrative that deeply informs and prefigures the story at each turn.

Even Fourth Mansions which is a pretty tightly written action narrative (for Lafferty) takes time to digress into the qualities of the different animals, the reasons for various impressions, and hallucinatory sequences that have more in common with dream logic than waking logic. For sheer reverie there was the rambling examination of Freddy's memories about the poor neighborhood of Tulsa and why he was afraid when he was there. Elements of that kept cropping up later on in the story, like the references to Leo Joe Larker having raised a boy from the dead when he was no more than ten years old. For sheer hallucinatory interludes there were the scene where Freddy was trying to reach Biddy via brain weave, and she was distracted on subterranean beaches while wild dogs tore her apart, and the multiple metaphorical scenes of the final battle between Arouet Manion and James Bauer.

A reviewer once said "One awakens from reading a Lafferty book as from a dream." I think that is particularly apt. His novels make more sense when you allow them to follow their own logic, and read along almost in a dream-like state or drunken reverie of your own in parallel. The result is that the individual images and impressions are striking and powerfully remembered, but the plot works directly on the subconscious, leaving very little conscious trace.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Forgive me. I know I shouldn't brag, but I still feel the need to share my--for lack of a better description--long-winded verbal "shelfie:" I've been a bit aquisitive since I first posted about My Lafferty Bookshelf in 2013. My collection now consists of:

The Reefs of Earth (1968) (2 reads)

Space Chantey (1968) (3 reads)

Past Master (1968) (4 reads)

Fourth Mansions (1969) (multiple copies, so I can force them into people's hands) (~7 reads)

That’s 51 books and chapbooks if you don't count the three volumes of Feast of Laughter. I finally have both published Coscuin books. I have more of the Argo mythos, but only one part of More than Melchisedech (one of the joys of Tales of Chicago was discovering the wonderful R. Ward Shipman illustrations--arrgh, I want to find Tales of Midnight and Argo).That being said, the primary joy of collecting these is reading them, not just owning. My copies go back and forth to work and on vacations with me for bus rides and odd quiet moments. Of course, I still haven't finished reading all of it. I'm currently halfway through Dotty, I have yet to get through Not to Mention Camels. I haven't actually finished Aurelia yet. There are also a few stories in some of the collections that I've skipped here and there. In time, I imagine I'll read through it all, and re-read, and re-read, and keep discovering new things!One notable exception to the reading-over-owning rule is the three Centipede Press volumes. They are so beautifully bound and published that just holding them in my hands is an aesthetic experience. They are a joy to see on the bookshelf--almost as much as they are a joy to read! I also get a kick out of seeing Feast of Laughter up on the bookshelf with all the other greats! There are still few hard or impossible to find Lafferty books I would love to track down (and be able to afford): The Devil is Dead Trilogy: